Some of the latest smug drivel from Glenn Greenwald:

Democrats have already begun flailing around trying to blame anyone and everyone they can find — everyone except themselves — for last night’s crushing defeat of their party. You know the drearily predictable list of their scapegoats: Russia, WikiLeaks, James Comey, Jill Stein, Bernie Bros, The Media, news outlets (including, perhaps especially, The Intercept) that sinned by reporting negatively on Hillary Clinton.

This is like saying, “The dam technicians have already started blaming the many cracks in the dam for the fact that the dam broke.” Yeah, all of those things did contribute! Of course they did. And, yeah, the Democratic leadership was also partly to blame. They were so cavalier as to put their early support behind the candidate with both the highest familiarity and the highest net favorability:

March, 2015
 
And, yeah, they already knew that this would cause her favorability to suffer, as Nate Silver wrote in 2012:

But if Mrs. Clinton runs for president in 2016, one thing is almost certain: she won’t be as popular as she is right now. Recent polls show that about 65 percent of Americans take a favorable view of Mrs. Clinton, while only about 30 percent have a negative one. Those are remarkably high numbers for a politician in an era when many public officials are distrusted or disliked.

And, keep in mind that, despite that suffering favorability, she still beat Bernie by nearly 3.7 million votes, mainly because she did so much better with non-white voters:

 

Now, onto tackling Greenwald’s list in the order given:

Russia

Russia was behind the cyberattack that led to the most recent major WikiLeaks DNC email bounty:

WikiLeaks

Maybe you wonder why WikiLeaks only publishes shit about Hillary and the Democrats. Well, wonder no more. Here’s none other than The Intercept to expand on that:

 

James Comey

The fact that Comey’s investigation apparently damaged Hillary’s polls quite starkly contrasts with some important conclusions:

Elijah Cummings: Do you agree with the claim that General Petraeus, and I quote, ‘Got in trouble for far less,’ end of quote? Do you agree with that statement?

Comey: His conduct, to me, illustrates the categories of behavior that mark the prosecutions that are actually brought. Clearly intentional conduct, knew what he was doing was a violation of the law, huge amounts of information that even if you couldn’t prove he knew it, it raises the inference that he did it, an effort to obstruct justice. That combination of things makes it worthy of a prosecution. A misdemeanor prosecution, but a prosecution nonetheless.

* * *

Blake Farenthold: How do you respond to people who are saying that this is not how (the) average American would be treated. This is only how Hillary Clinton would be treated?

Comey: When people tell you that others have been treated differently, demand from a trustworthy source the details of those cases because — I’m a very aggressive investigator, I was a very aggressive prosecutor — I have gone back through 40 years of cases, and I’m telling you under oath that to prosecute on these facts would be a double standard, because Jane and Joe Smith would not be prosecuted on these facts.

Jill Stein

Stein was a vocal opponent of Hillary at a time when, as Bernie was well aware, she needed every bit of support possible:

I join millions of Americans who see Hillary Clinton’s campaign as the opposite of what they and Bernie Sanders have fought for. Despite her penchant for flip flopping rhetoric, Hillary Clinton has spent decades consistently serving the causes of Wall Street, war and the Walmart economy.

Maybe Greenwald is also reluctant to criticize a supporter:

And this:

 

Of course, we should note (as Wasserman did) that we don’t know if Stein voters (or Johnson voters) would have voted at all if a third-party candidate weren’t available.

And this:

Under Hillary Clinton, we could slide into nuclear war very quickly from her declared policy in Syria. So I won’t sleep well at night if Donald Trump is elected, but I sure won’t sleep well at night if Hillary Clinton is elected. Fortunately, we have another choice other than these two candidates, who are both promoting lethal policies. But on the issue of war and nuclear weapons, and the potential for nuclear war, it is actually Hillary’s policies which are much scarier than Donald Trump….

Bernie Bros

It was among Bernie Bros that I first heard the slogan “Hillary for Prison”:

Snapshots Taken by Me February of this Year

What do you think? Did this help Hillary or hurt her?

The Media

From a study by Thomas E. Patterson of the Harvard Shorenstein Center:

Bernie Sanders’ campaign was largely ignored in the early months but, as it began to get coverage, it was overwhelmingly positive in tone. Sanders’ coverage in 2015 was the most favorable of any of the top candidates, Republican or Democratic. For her part, Hillary Clinton had by far the most negative coverage of any candidate.

Whereas media coverage helped build up Trump, it helped tear down Clinton. Trump’s positive coverage was the equivalent of millions of dollars in ad-buys in his favor, whereas Clinton’s negative coverage can be equated to millions of dollars in attack ads, with her on the receiving end. Of the eight news outlets in our study, Fox News easily led the way.

Updated 1/26/17

Question: Didn’t Democratic superdelegates, the media, and the DNC cheat Bernie out of the Democratic nomination?

Response:

Superdelegates

The current superdelegate rules have been in place since 1982. Over that time, superdelegates haven’t mattered much to any Democratic race:

In fact, even without superdelegates, Hillary beat Bernie by over 3 1/2 million votes:

Bernie’s not an idiot, so he had to have known when he officially announced his candidacy on March 27th, 2015, that Hillary already had an unprecedented superdelegate endorsement advantage, compared not just to him but to any candidate since the current system began:

The Media

As for the media cheating Bernie out of the nomination, the best evidence is mixed. According to a study by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, the media didn’t initially give Bernie adequate attention to up his name recognition in the crucial early stages of the campaign. However, when he did begin to get media coverage, that coverage was the most positive of any candidate, Republican or Democrat, while the coverage of Hillary was the most negative of any candidate:

Month-to-Month Tone of Sanders’s Coverage

Month-to-Month Tone of Clinton’s Coverage

Another study, by Jonathan Stray of NiemanLab, found that the media’s average coverage of a candidate tracked very closely with that candidate’s position in the polls:

The DNC

Much has been made in alternative liberal media circles of a supposed DNC conspiracy to sabotage Bernie. The evidence is fairly thin, though. One example is this email from DNC rep Eric Walker: “If she outperforms this [Rhode Island] polling, the Bernie camp will go nuts and allege misconduct. They’ll probably complain regardless, actually.” It’s apparently outrageous to make such a prediction even though Bernie supporters and his campaign reps complained frequently and loudly about many aspects of the primary. One supporter, Tim Robbins, is mentioned in the same email exchange after posting the following tweet:

Robbins has since deleted this Tweet, but not before Joshua Holland of Raw Story got a snapshot and investigated the numbers. He summed up his findings like this:

So there you have it. They say a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on, and that’s especially true of the internet. Here we have an example of an actor citing a comedian who picked up a claim from an anonymous Reddit user citing preliminary exit poll data put together by a JFK conspiracy theorist. Bringing it all full circle is The Hill, which ran a story titled, “Actor Tim Robbins blames Sanders losses on ‘voter fraud,’” which will no doubt be shared thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter.

It took hours of copying, pasting, and calculating for me to put together this compilation of all of the primary exit/entrance poll results (all data from here, which, ultimately, means from here). Once I had this info, though, I could update that Tim Robbins meme:

Still convinced of malfeasance? At the very least, you should be questioning the strength of these claims.

UPDATE

A friend asked me to clarify why poll results get adjusted, so I’m adding some extra info about exit polls.

Short version: Bernie supporters skew young. Young voters are more likely to respond to exit polls. Polling orgs like Edison Research then have to adjust the stats to fit known demographics.

Long version: To start with, let’s say you want to try to get a good, representative sample of feelings from Massachusetts Democratic primary voters.  From the 2008 MA Democratic primary, you have the following age breakdown:

You must now confront people and ask them to fill out a survey for you. You try to get roughly equal numbers of all of these groups of people. In the 2008 Dem primary, about 1.26 million people voted. According to the central limit theorem, the number of randomly-sampled responses you need for a representative sample is about 30. But, it’s impossible to get a random sample in this situation. So, you try to get a good variety of about 30 people from each of those age groups. But, you’re eye-balling it and only about 45% of people will fill out your survey. So, really, you just do your best.

You pool your collected data with the data of 50 other pollsters with each pollster trying to get 30 responses from each age group for a total of 6,000 results (30 responses * 4 age groups * 50 pollsters). The demographics you end up with resemble this:

Now, these are the unadjusted results. Let’s see how these results work out with age results we got from Iowa:

Now, let’s apply these figures to our unadjusted responses:

OK. Now, let’s adjust these results to conform better to 2008 Massachusetts Democratic primary demographics. This is called “weighting” and, to do this, we divide the known variable into the sampled variable:

Now, we end up with the following:

 
Updated 11/16/2016.